I'm hoping to reach out to google's gmail engineers with this message, Today I noticed that for the past 3 days, email messages from my personal website's pop3 were not being received into my gmail inbox. Naturally, I figured that my pop3 service was down, but after some checking, every thing was working OK. I then checked gmail settings, and noticed some error. It explained that google is no longer accepting self signed ssl certificates. It claims that this change will "offer[s] a higher level of security to better protect your information". I don't believe that this change offers better security. In fact it is now unsecured - I am unable to use ssl with gmail, I have had to select the plain-text pop3 option. I don't have hundreds of dollars to get my ssl certificates signed, and to top it off, gmail never notified me of an error with fetching my mail. How many of email accounts trying to grab mail are failing now? I bet thousands, as a self signed certificate is a valid way of encrypting the traffic. Please google, remove this requirement. Source: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=21291&ctx=gmail#strictSSL